Market day again on rue Auguste-Blanqui. We bought some indifferent pastries, as we were in a hurry, and as the kids were finishing them on place d'Italie, Z slipped while chasing A around and fell into the mud around a nearby tree. N whisked her upstairs to change; if such a thing has to happen, in front of the hotel is the best place. As a consequence, it was close to 9:15 when we arrived at the Musee d'Orsay, having taken the RER from Gare d'Austerlitz. To our surprise, there was no line at all; we could walk right in. On Sundays the Orsay opens an hour earlier; that must have been the reason.
Z was in a snit over some minor incident as we walked down the main hall and wouldn't look at any of the sculptures, which was no great loss, really. She pouted through the Millet room, so I had to explain to A why his paintings were controversial and how they prefigured the Impressionists.
But when we reached the room of Manet paintings, Z snapped out of it, and earned her passage home. "I recognize that painting!" she squealed again and again - evidently, the study of the Orsay catalogue at home, which she had initiated once I had taken it out of the university library, had paid off. "That's called The Balcony -- that's Manet's parents -- that's an early Monet," she said, running from painting to painting.
Was she just parroting what I had said? I don't think so; as with Venice the year before, and with A's Italian visits at a similar age or younger, she could explain a lot of what she was seeing in her own words, and even point out things we had not mentioned to her, or not even noticed. Or perhaps both Italian Renaissance sacred paintings and Impressionist works were intended to appeal to children, without the need for excessive conceptualization (though they are capable of that, too, when necessary, as it is in any museum of 20th-century art).
Through the early Degas paintings -- "Where are the dancers?" they both asked, and so we had to abandon the chronological order, and after a break spent walking over the model of the Opera neighbourhood and answering questions about the cutaway model of the opera house itself, we had to take the express escalators to the top level.
The children were in heaven as we emerged into cool rooms, brightly lit by the natural sunlight, full of paintings they recognized and loved. It could have been a candy store; they held hands and half-skipped, half-ran from painting to painting, talking animatedly to each other. Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe, Moulin de la Galette, La Balancoire, Le Berceau. Other patrons looked at them and smiled, those who weren't walking through with their latest digital toys, capturing three seconds of each painting before moving on to the next.
I often find Renoir to be as hard to take as rich food, but perhaps because of the way I had been eating on this trip, I was able to look at his paintings this time without feeling glutted. Monet's Rouen Cathedral series and one of his "bran muffin" haystacks; Van Gogh; Cezanne. The kids had noticed the views over the Seine and wanted to go out on the terrace. I thought, in planning, that we would have an early lunch at the Cafe des Hauteurs, but we had reached this point shortly before eleven, so we just walked through and out into the sunlight for a few minutes.
We continued through the Degas pastels (the dancers that the children had been waiting for), and a little more quickly through the remainder of the floor, stopping at works that caught the eye of Z or A, like Gauguin's Snakecharmer, or Seurat and Signac's pointillist works.
On the middle level, we skipped the stuffy fin-de-siecle works and the reactionary pre-Raphaelites to zoom in on the Art Nouveau furniture and decorative works, including much Guimard. A short visit to the bookstore, during which we found many French children's books on drastic sale, and we were out, at about 12:15.
I knew of no good addresses in this area. Fortunately, I had entered most of the interesting restaurants from Patricia Wells's "Food Lover's Guide To Paris" into my Newton, and a quick perusal turned up Bouillon Racine, a Belgian brasserie near the Odeon metro stop, two short rides away.
"Belgian brasserie" was somewhat of a misconception, as it turns out. This is one of the old bouillons, or working-class soup kitchens, done in Art Nouveau style and stunningly restored, with mirrors, wood carved in curves with green and gilt trim, floral stained glass, and wavy chandeliers. It was more expensive than we had anticipated -- 179F menu, not moules frites territory -- but worth it.
N and K had duck carpaccio to start; I had fois gras de canard maison, mi-cuit, with a tangle of mesclun and an eggplant puree. Mains were all dishes cooked in beer, but with considerable variation and subtlety; K had braised pork ribs, N a filet de canette (breast of young duck), and I a dish called stoump, confit de lapin topped with potatoes and vegetables Parmentier-style on a bed of snow peas. The kids shared bits of all our meals, and tastes for the adults went all around and across the table. To drink we had a draught kriek lambic (artisanal beer flavoured with cherries), one of N's favourites.
We ordered an extra dessert for the children, three fruit-flavoured pots de creme, but as it turns out, they preferred our desserts, a financier in raspberry sauce, and melon soup with red fruits and a hint of saffron. All in all, an unexpectedly stunning meal, and a real find. This restaurant is just a few steps off the busy Boulevard Saint-Michel, but we would never have stumbled across it. Three cheers for Patricia Wells, and Newton technology!
Out into a sultry day. We tried to stay in the shadows as we skirted the back of the Odeon theatre and walked into the Jardin de Luxembourg. It was fairly crowded with strollers and people lounging in whatever shade they could find. What appeared to be an American high school band was in place in the gazebo to the north; the kids were intrigued, but when they started doing scales (!) we convinced them to move on, as they were not interested in formal gardens, and there seemed to be no climbing equipment in sight. As we left the park to the east, the bleary strains of the Marseillaise followed us, and then, as if to confirm our judgement, the Star-Spangled Banner.
Into the Luxembourg RER station, down to Denfert-Rochereau, change to line 6, and home. We relaxed, even napping briefly (bad for K's adjustment to California time) and the kids played. As lone adults, we might have crammed another activity in, or sat in a cafe, but the structure imposed on our downtime by the kids was not onerous: we had air conditioning, cold drinks in the fridge and snacks if we wished, and I could plug in the Newton and catch up on travel notes. The kids tended to amuse themselves with elaborate role-playing, using props drawn on plain paper and cut out.
A little after six, we headed out, and took the metro to the Belleville station. This is an area with a concentration of recent immigrants, and I found myself examining things closely with an eye to spotting institutional French racism. Was there a longer wait between trains? Was it an older train, cleaned less often?
Emerging at the corner of rue de Belleville and rue de Menilmontant, it seemed just another busy late afternoon Parisian street scene, except for the character of the businesses, and the mix of races, even more pronounced than in the Goutte d'Or. As we headed up rue de Belleville, N said, "This is the Chinatown we had expected in the 13th," though "Chinatown" here was shorthand for East Asian, as among Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and others, no one country of origin dominated.
Our dinner destination was Lao-Siam, mentioned in the Guide Routard, the Rough Guide, and even Le Bottin Gourmand. On the wall, they had a faded Patricia Wells review from 1992. The restaurant was stiflingly hot, and the air wasn't moving. I ordered a quarter-litre of rose, and K decided to have a glass. We chose a number of dishes from the menu, with both plain rice and sticky rice to go with them. Some were quite successful; others, such as a seafood medley with big chunks of crab in it, would have been better served to people who knew how to pop a joint into their mouths and spit out the shell while leaving the meat inside. I would put the quality about on par with Lao-Thai in the 13e.
After dinner, we walked a block north to see the plaque on the doorstep where Edith Piaf was found abandoned as an infant, and then up the hill to the new Parc de Belleville. This rose at the top to a great view of Paris, with the sun still an hour from truly setting, and then descended through terraces and reflecting pools. It seemed, as with the other new parks such as Andre-Citroen, that the architects and city planners had exerted an undue influence compared to the social and community workers. Kids were splashing in the shallow fountain basins, ignoring signs that the water was not drinkable and they should not swim. And why not? It was hot, and what they needed was play space, not formal gardens and angular glass pavillions.
We walked through yet another modern housing development at the bottom of the hill, and along one of the dirtiest streets I had seen in Paris -- clearly, no daily opening of the water mains and men with green brooms to sweep debris along here. But, coming onto boulevard de Belleville, the atmosphere livened up again; we passed couscouseries and kabob places, tables several deep on the broad sidewalk, filled with people eating and drinking. N stopped at a small Tunisian bakery and the proprietor asked the children to point out what they wanted, then carefully wrapped each pastry in paper and handed it directly to each kid.
Standing at the corner adjacent to the one where we entered the area, in front of a glass window filled with hanging barbecued ducks, it seemed that the whole character of the area had changed in a few short hours; it had become some blend of a Parisian faubourg and a pan-Asian palette. We lingered for a few minutes, absorbing the atmosphere. N remarked afterward that at that moment, she was (at fifty percent) the whitest person she could see on the street. Into the metro and home.